Any type of file left over after removing apps from your system is basically junk and tends to slow down your Mac’s performance. MacBooster intends to help you deal with this issue by cleaning your disk, including Internet-related data, and optimizing your system.

MacBooster is yet another application designed to keep your Mac clean while trying to provide security-related functions, such as periodically deleting your browsing history, cookies, viruses, and other malicious files.

The app’s tools are organized by purpose: you can perform system scans to detect the files that need to be removed, or you can use the individual tools to uninstall apps together with all related files, clean your RAM, detect duplicate/large files, or prevent apps or services from launching at login.

MacBooster comes as a one-time purchase and provides 3 license types (the price increases gradually and the variations are significant): Lite (for 1 Mac), Standard (for 3 Macs), and Premium (for 5 computers). Note that the Lite version does not include the “Full system clean and boost” function.

MacBooster provides an installer package, and the uninstalling process is reduced to a simple drag and drop to your Mac's Trash. Ironically, when removed, MacBooster leaves behind junk files that can be detected and removed by other system cleaning apps, such as AppCleaner.

MacBooster takes a big chunk of your resources while scanning your Mac. It may use up to 80% of the CPU of a 2GHz i7 Intel processor and up to 200 MB of RAM.

The app interface matches the general Mac OS X look and feel but also greatly resembles other system clean-up applications out there. All things considered, MacBooster’s overall design certainly does not strike as original.

Working with MacBooster usually implies a combination of scanning your Mac, choosing the changes and optimizations you want to perform, and then pressing the “Fix” or “Boost” buttons from the initial panel.

The process is quite intuitive, even though the scanning part usually takes a long time (about 5 hours for 150GB) if you choose to perform a Full Internet Security scan (the Fast Scan option is selected by default). You also need to pay attention to what you choose to delete: MacBooster automatically selects all detected files, it's not keeping logs, and the removal is final, so a wrong mouse click is not an option.

Furthermore, dealing with user log files, leftover shortcuts, broken login items, or cache files should not raise any issues, but things get a bit more complicated when you choose to remove files related to your Internet activity.

MacBooster should provide full support for at least three of the most popular browsers on the OS X platform (i.e. Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox), however, during our tests, the app collected data just from the Safari and Chrome browsers and only offered to delete some cache and cookie files for Firefox.

Specifically, MacBooster was able to detect different types of malicious cookies and offered to block them, but also flagged as a trojan and wanted to delete a file included in the Java runtime. In addition, it volunteered to delete Safari browsing sessions and history-related files for both Safari and Google Chrome (top sites, visited links, current tabs, downloads, and more).

The problem is that you do not know for sure what type of info is contained in each file displayed in the Internet History results panel, so you might be better off cleaning these things using the tools provided for such purposes by each browser.

At this point, there are certain mentions to be made: MacBooster does not continuously protect your Mac against threats. The app scans certain areas to detect malicious files, but only when you manually launch that process. Even the Auto Clean process, which can be configured to automatically run once a day or once a week, deals only with the Internet history, sessions, and cache files.

On top of that, there is no mention of how the application decides if a certain item is malicious or not, how often the virus definitions are updated, and how. All in all, it does not seem to be the most reliable security solution.

When it comes to optimization, MacBooster proved to be quite useful because it managed to identify non-Apple services, thus enabling us to quickly track down and remove unwanted launch daemons and agents.

The Good

MacBooster is easy to use and provides a collection of basic system cleaning tools within the same interface, which have the potential of making the process faster (after you get past the scanning part).

Furthermore, it can detect non-Apple services, the launch agents, and daemons that should launch on login. This way you can stop or remove the unwanted services without manually searching for their files.

The Bad

MacBooster’s approach to the often laborious task of cleaning a Mac, including its design, is hardly original and brings very few new things to the table, even though its price is quite high.

The MacBooster scanners did not detect Firefox history files and recent user log files, and a file from the Java runtime was flagged as a virus.

Moreover, to boost your performance, the app encourages you to shut down Apple services without providing an explanation. The same mystery surrounds the virus definitions used by MacBooster (note that the threat protection is not continuous and you must manually trigger the scanning for malicious files).

In addition, taking into account that MacBooster is a system cleaning utility, the fact that it leaves behind related files after uninstallation is not at all flattering.

The Truth

The few interesting MacBooster features, such as the capability to detect services, launch daemons or launch agents, are lost among basic tools that, in some cases, are made available by freeware apps.

To conclude, MacBooster should be sporting a collection of more innovative, time-efficient, and transparent tools to justify its current price.